[The central character of Nathalie Sarraute's Between Life and Death] is a writer and her central concern is the "mere complexities, the fury and the mire" of his creative life—the whole thing smacks not of autobiography (too little occurs to justify that word) but of alteregoism. And, as the young Turkish poet Murad Osman-Talaat has written:

… nothing strikes an alteregoist with more horror than the prospect that someone may be converted to his way of seeing….

Miss Sarraute rattles the reader around in this writer's head for nearly two hundred pages without a "conversion," without a coincidence of understanding between reader and character. This is partly the fault of the book's hyperintellectuality, even more of its prose.

Maria Jolas' translation is extraordinarily good, in the somewhat extraordinary sense that it accurately reflects a falling-off in Miss Sarraute's style. Her previous work, especially The Golden Fruits, had a witty consistency of tone that now seems shattered; large stretches of Between Life and Death could have been written by a dyspeptic machinegun.

The book's dustjacket, quoting Le Monde, tells us this style is "new, simple in its means but bold in form." It is certainly "bold," if not audacious, in some of its elements—I cannot recall another book in any language wherein so many pronouns do (or attempt) the work of so few appositives. But is there anything original in such writing as this:

Perhaps it's better to wait a little longer, continue to postpone the moment … that it's really no longer possible to resist, that that forces your hand…. That. What's that, after all? Everybody out here keeps on saying it, keeps shouting it from the rooftops: there's no 'that' that matters. [dots and spacing in original]

or this:

The fall of day. Poor human glory. Not the pain of trying. Or again, when our material interest is involved in it. As in Inga's case. Yes, her. She owes it to herself. Oh, I'd be proud and happy.

The second passage quoted seems to me as representative of Miss Sarraute's "new" style as the first—despite the fact it was written by Valery Larbaud in 1921, in self-confessed if unsuccessful imitation of Joyce.